After a month of voting on iwillpayyourparkingticket.com, you chose the winning tweet from twitter.com/jenwell, and I couldn’t be happier with your choice! It is so in line with the spirit of the website.

But of course my messages to Jennifer were ignored; sadly she just thought I was a British weirdo. (And she wouldn’t be entirely wrong ) So what could I do? In a last ditch effort to contact her, at Flash on the Beach, I asked the audience to tweet her to reassure her that I was genuine, and around 100 people sent her @ replies on twitter!

So to cut a long story short, I arranged to meet Jennifer in New York as her boyfriend lives in Brooklyn and our travel plans overlapped by one day. Her boyfriend Brian very kindly filmed our meeting where she told me the story of her parking ticket and when she first realised I was trying to find her. Note that just like in Minneapolis, I paid Jennifer’s ticket in a mixture of currencies

Now we’ve had our first winner, we have some more work to do on the website, including being able to see the top ten best tweets, previous winners and also adding donations so this project doesn’t ruin me

Having put on FlashBrighton’s Big Day Out (which was less than half the size of FlashPitt) I know how much work goes on to produce conference like this. And if anything, Val makes it look so easy. Too easy in fact. It’s hard to comprehend all the hard work that went into this when she looks so damn cool all the time.

But don’t be fooled, a lot of love goes into this conference, and there’s an incredibly high caliber of speakers. My good friends Jer Thorp, Stacey Mulcahey, Julian Dolce, Phillip Kerman, Scott Janousek were there. And it was a pleasure to meet new speakers who were also incredibly inspiring, particularly Josh Sager, Dan Mall from Big Spaceship, Boris and Damon from Odopod, and Ian Coyle who has a letter press printer in his office – cool!

So keep up the good work, and people of Pittsburgh : Be thankful that you have something this cool in your city and make sure you make the most of it.

Still to come: Overdue reports on the rest of MAX, and visiting YouTube and Odopod in San Francisco.

Now I think about it I really can see why my post caused such a reaction. I was curt in my brevity and it was negative. My opinion hasn’t really changed but I do feel like I did myself a disservice by the tone of my writing. More than that, I’m quite horrified at how negative my post sounds now I’ve re-read it. There were indeed many things about MAX that I did like and I hope to go into some of these in later posts.

But right now I’d like to explore my personal relationship with Adobe, and try to figure out if there’s a way I can work more closely to become a more useful collaborator in future.

I must admit, our relationship has a somewhat chequered past. Some of our tiffs have occurred in public and others I have chosen not to talk about, in an increasingly rare display of discretion

The truth is that I often find it very hard to tally my position as a “community leader” and open source contributor with the fact that Adobe is, after all, a multi-million dollar corporation. It’s a essentially a symbiotic relationship, but it’s when Adobe makes bad business decisions that adversely affect the community that I feel compelled to speak out.

But trust me, I really do not enjoy being the voice of dissent. In fact I find it incredibly stressful. Anyone who knows me will realise I’m generally a positive person, and I’m passionate about digital creativity. I evangelise the Flash Platform at conferences and events all around the world.

I also find it very difficult to distinguish between the anonymous corporation and the many talented passionate people behind the scenes. So sometimes its just too easy to be dismissive without realising that there are real genuinely caring people that are behind the work upon which you are passing judgement.

I felt heartened when Lee described us as “friends who sometimes disagree” and that made me realise that he cares enough about what I say to correct me when I’m wrong and argue the other point of view when I state an opinion.

It’s also become somewhat of a surprise to me that people seem to listen to what I say; I now realise that I have a responsibility to explain myself clearly and accurately, stating my position with respect to the many individuals who have invested their time and effort to build the products that make Adobe what it is.

So! It is with a renewed sense of enthusiasm that I reach out to Mike and Lee, both of whom I respect massively, and ask that we communicate more efficiently with one another. We are friends (at least I consider us so) with many shared qualities and passions. Sadly though, we’ve rarely had the chance to chat for more than 5 minutes here and there, or the odd twitter message. I’d love to get to know you both better and to share the things that drive me and hopefully you’ll see that I’m more than my random mildly sarcastic tweets.

Don’t get me wrong though. I will tell you honestly what I think. Sometimes it will be good, and sometimes not so good. But I promise to do it more constructively. And I’ll also take the time to talk about what I love.

So it’s with this in mind that I will add some further explanation to my previous MAX post.

Group hug?

Of course, Ralph has left, and i’ll miss him. But smart people like him need constant new challenges and I have no doubt that he will move on to bigger and better things! And I seem to be seeing him just as much as before!

Papervision3D 3.0
So we’re moving on with PV3.0, which will be our Flash Player 10 optimised version, rebuilt from scratch. Tim’s already making great headway with some of the core code such as how we handle rotations (with quaternions at the heart of every DO3D) and even some niceness with frustum clipping.

Openness
I think we’ve been guilty in the past of a lack of transparency in our process. When we all work hard for a living, it can be hard to make sure that we keep the community updated with what’s going on.

So we’ve decided this time to make the source code for 3.0 available on github as we’re working on it. If you have something to contribute, you can fork the code and have a go. If we like it, we’ll add it in!

New team members
Which brings us to the fact that we want new team members. If you do cool work with the code base we’ll most likely ask you to join us. Already we’ve enlisted Ben Hopkins who caught our attention with some crazy PixelBender experiments. Perhaps you could too?

Backwards compatibility
There are many things that need to be changed in the new version, so we’ve made a rule. That rule is that we’ll keep the API the same as PV2.0 unless there’s a very good reason to change it.

One of the more notable changes is that the axis system has changed, the z-axis now comes out of the screen rather than going into it. This is to bring PV3D in line with pretty much all the other serious 3D engines, and it should also make it easier to port code from OpenGL.

Papervision2.1 support
We realise there are some issues still to resolve in 2.1 and I for one, am going to continue using this branch for some time. So although there is a lot of energy and excitement around PV3, it doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about the older code base.

I’m really really excited about these changes, and the renewed sense of energy that it brings. I believe the Papervision team members are among the best Flash programmers in the world, and it’s such a privilege to be a part of it.

It’s been a few days now since I left LA and the craziness that was my first Adobe MAX. And honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about it. So I’ve decided to offload my thoughts here on my blog! You lucky people.

My first attempt at this blog post upset a lot of people and I later realised that it could have been more diplomatically written. So find further explanations and additions in italics.

The Nokia theatre is impressive, with a huge screen and two massive HD LED screens on either side of the stage. The stage set is a montage of various famous LA buildings.

The keynote starts with a group of kids graffitiing up a wall and then scanning it into illustrator. It just seemed like such a contrived attempt to appear hip. I later find out it’s the Peapod academy, and I am somewhat more sympathetic to the kids who put this together themselves.

Had we been presented more of the narrative behind this, maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so contrived?

Followed by the CEO introducing the guy from Omniture. Anyone who’s ever had to integrate Omniture will know how annoying it is. And this guy was even more annoying, with an offhand remark about how rich he had become.

I really enjoyed Kevin Lynch and Johnny Loiacono’s Myth Busters pastiche about Flash and the iPhone, I’ve seen similar things with KL in that have been truly cringeworthy but this was genuinely funny and well made.

Throughout the conference there was definitely too much focus on Augmented Reality in Flash. First the USPS AR tool to check your parcel size (which doesn’t work as well as a ruler), followed by a particularly glitchy John Mayer AR “experience”. Which was so tenuous an excuse to get John Mayer involved as i’ve ever seen. But the man himself was charming and funny.

I need to back up this statement by explaining my own history with AR. It was pretty fun at first and I did a couple of cool experiments and one project. But since then I’ve been jaded by many advertising creatives coming up with increasingly poor excuses to use this technology. It just seems like it’s the new thing that people do without really thinking about it. Kind of like the page turn effect was a couple of years ago.

To be fair, the John Mayer thing did look good. It just didn’t seem to run very well. As someone who spends weeks and weeks on optimising 3D rendering in Flash I notice these things.

And of course the big announcement was Flash compilation for the iPhone. I love that Adobe got onto the iPhone by stealth, and it’s brilliant that there are already Flash apps on the App Store. I’m really interested to hear what Apple have to say about that!

The truth is though that Flash certainly doesn’t currently run very well on the iPhone, and honestly, I wouldn’t expect it to. It’ll The CPU on the iPhone and other devices generally run at 1% to 10% of the speed it runs on a of desktop CPUs, which makes it currently unusable for all but the simplest of apps. I think that for the vast majority of iPhone apps you’ll be better off building with native code, certainly if you want the slick and smooth experience that you’re used to.

Look at Fickleblox as an example of how glitchy Flash animation is on the iPhone. (Most of the other Flash based apps avoid this sort of thing).

When you think about how hard this must have been to achieve, you can understand why people at Adobe are defensive about it, and I’m sure that any negative reaction comes as a surprise to them. After all, isn’t it what we’ve been asking for all this time?

I agree with Keith who expresses his opinion much more eloquently than me and has the experience to back it up. So go on over to his blog post and the subsequent comments.

More thoughts from MAX coming.

But not this year! Because on Friday (tomorrow!) I’m starting my mini USA tour! And I’ll be seeing pretty much all of them again!

Starting in LA for MAX courtesy of the awesome Influxis crew, where I’m speaking at the FITC unconference. And I’m in good company; in an endevour that has become know as the EuroMaxInvasion, I’ll be there with Joa Ebert, Ralph Hauwert, Mario Klingemann, and Andre Michelle! In other words, the best Flashers in the world! How did I get in with that crowd?

Thanks to Scott Janousek for the photo!

Followed by a few days in San Francisco to see my friends at Odopod and check out the NoiseBridge hacker space.

Then off to FlashPitt; I’m really excited about this one. I met Val the organiser at FlashBelt, and she seems so cool, I just know that this will be a great conference.

My final destination is New York City for my one day Papervision3D workshop (only 4 spaces left!) and hanging out with Josh and my friends at BigSpaceShip and FlashCodersNewYork.

All in all, I’ll be gone for three weeks. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

I really do hate to ask, but if you like Big and Small, please take the time to vote for us in the Adobe Max awards.

Some of you may have noticed some pretty dodgy things happening on this website. Unfortunately I’ve been the target of some particularly unpleasant spam robots that hacked one of the wordpress sites on my server and started injecting invisible links everywhere.

I can’t apologise enough – I’m extremely embarrassed.

I’ve now moved to an entirely new server, so please, please let me know if you notice any more problems.

It’s next week! NEXT WEEK! The most exciting digitally creative speakers will be descending on my home town to the 4 day inspiration-fest that is Flash on the Beach.So I thought I’d take a look at the schedule and let you know who I’m planning to watch.

Except John has totally screwed me over by booking such great speakers that for many sessions I can barely manage to narrow it down to two! Thanks John!

So here, are my recommendations…

MONDAY
9:00 Keynote with Richard Galvan
I guess we may as well go see the Adobe gang, although I strongly suspect they’ll be saving the good stuff for Adobe MAX.

10:15 Keith Peters, Casual Game Architecture
How can I not go see my good friend Keith? Especially when he’s talking about such a great subject. But I expect that Carlo Blatz will also be shedding some light on the workflow at PowerFlasher, so I’ll be sad to miss that.

11:30 Carlos Ulloa, HelloEnjoy
Carlos has had such great accolades bestowed upon him this year and for good reason. The quality of his work is exceptional, and if you knew how long he spent on the tiniest details then you’d have a small insight into his life. Rich Shupe is also worth checking out – he’s a great teacher.

13:30 Rob Chui, Fear/Love
If you saw Rob’s brilliant Flash on the Beach video last year, you’ll see the kind of work this guy is capable of. My friend Mike Jones is also worth checking out if you’re a Flex fiend (although I think he’s talking about Catalyst).

14:45 Joshua Hirsch, Big Spaceship : Fun begets quality
A very close call here between Josh and Dr Woohoo! who is a brilliant and inspiring digital artist. But Josh wins by a whisker, just because I love Big Spaceship and the work they do. Any insight into their process is surely unmissable.

16:00 Hillman Curtis, Telling Stories
I’ve seen Hillman present a couple of times, and he left with me a desire to create short films! And he also made me feel like anyone could do it. Which is, ultimately, what you want out of a session like this

20:00 Joel Gethin Lewis, Epiphany
I met Joel at FlashBelt this year, and he sparked somewhat of an epiphany of my own. He creates mindblowing installations using OpenFrameworks, which he describes as “Processing on crack”. He is an incredibly confident and eloquent speaker and I love his work.

TUESDAY
9:00 Elevator Pitch
For once it’ll be worth getting out of bed early on Tuesday to witness the insane spectacle that is the 3 Minute Wonders. In order to cultivate new talent, John has offered 20 speakers a 3 minute slot to show us what they’re capable of. There are 2 FlashBrighton members; Matt Pearson (talking about generative art) and Nick Kuh. Other noteworthy wonders are Iain Lobb (a brilliant London game coder), Jon Howard from the BBC (who will make a game in 3 minutes – this I have to see!) and Andrew Fitzgerald (maker of Partigen particle engine).

10:15 Grant Skinner, Quick as a Flash
Sadly, Grant pipped Peter Elst to the post – I’d love to see Peter’s session about being a freelancer, if only to hear his secrets! But instead I’ll probably make it over to see Grant. Who seriously knows his stuff. If you’re an actionscripter you have to see Grant.

11:30 Joa Ebert, Leaving the Sandbox
Another incredibly difficult choice, the truth is that I would also very much like to see Andy Polaine’s session about play, and my friend Lisa Larson-Kelley’s FMS presentation. But as a geek, I have to choose Joa, the geek of geeks.

13:30 Richard Lord, Application Framworks
Truth is, I would actually choose to see Jeremy Thorp’s brilliant session, but I just saw it at FlashBelt. So instead I’ll be checking out my London friend Richard Lord, talking about application frameworks. I actually hate application frameworks, but I’ll see what he has to say about them to see if I can be persuaded. But I doubt it.

14:45 Joel Baumann, Numbers in Art
The work of London agency Tomato is world reknown, so it’ll be great to hear more about how they work. But I’d also like to see Karsten Schmidt. Dammit!

16:00 Contrast, Unconventional Web Applications
I’m not massively excited about this session, but it’s the only choice for this slot. I hear great things about these guys, but my only experience of them is Qwitter, which I use, and doesn’t seem to work (unless no one is ever unfollowing me on Twitter, which I seriously doubt ) I’ll keep an open mind, then

20:00 Craig Swann, Choose your own Adventure
A welcome return to Brighton for Craig, who skipped last year I think. I certainly haven’t seen him for a while. His sessions are always fun and his work is really cool. Whether it’s playing around with motion detection or electronic wind chimes.

WEDNESDAY
9:00 Koen de Weggheleire, Play with Vectors!
Again, massively torn here between Koen and Andre Michelle, but I saw Andre recently, so I’m gonna give my vote to Koen this time. His enthusiasm and humour fill his presentations and he’s a great speaker.

10:15 Stacey Mulcahey, Can play well with others
Of course Mario’s session will also be unmissable, but I saw him at FlashBelt and anyone who follows @bitchwhocodes will get a feel of Stacey’s sense of humour. But along with the comedy are some really useful real world examples of how to run software projects (and how not to run them!)

11:30 Hugh Elliot, The 10 Best Excuses Not to do Amazing Work
Of course you should come and see me speaking (there’ll be glowsticks) but naturally I can’t vote for myself. Hugh is a great guy and I’ve never seen him speak. But due to the dodgy scheduling I guess I never will! Also keen to see what Colin’s up to but I can’t split myself into 3 dammit!

14:45 Ralph Hauwert, Research realtime graphics with Flash 10
Of course I will be supporting my fellow Papervision3D team member and all round genius Ralph speaking about his crazy hard core graphics experiments. For the less geeky, I would recommend Jared Ficklin’s sound session, he does some great things with fire (See his Ruben’s Tube).

16:00 Joshua Davis, Space
It’s great to have Josh back in Brighton, he’s one of the truly pioneering Flash artists, I’m looking forward to see his latest work.

So it’s an absolutely mindblowing schedule, and every single speaker is brilliant, and I’m really sorry that I’ve passed so many notable sessions over. I blame John for that.